Final thoughts on this research study

This study has offered a number of very interesting insights into the topic of Mass Customisation and people’s motivations to purchase these products. The last blogs provided some interesting findings and also suggestions for future research in this area. Most importantly the outcome for the experiential need to avoid a bad experience or bad word of mouth as it could have a big influence on potential customers. 

This study was quite exploratory as motivations had not yet been looked at so extensively in a Mass Customisation setting. The concept of Mass Customisation has been around for a few decades now, but there are not many companies that used the full potential of it. After the completion of this study I would say this is due to the lack of consumer research, particularly concerning consumer motivations as they may be unconscious.

Although the sample of my study was quite small, it was visible that consumers did not know much about Mass Customisation, in particular the pure form of customisation. So companies should not only carry out more consumer research, but they should also try to educate their customers more. 

The Phase 2 Interview Results - part 6

The outcome for the utilitarian need was quite low in the questionnaires, but this changed for the interviews where participants said that it was very important for them that the product would be to their preferences. However, this is also the nature of mass customised products and therefore people might expect the products to be the right fit. Some participants also concluded that if a product is unique and based on their preferences, it should be the right fit. Therefore, uniqueness was always ranked as very high. In connection to the willingness to pay research it should be added here that the results from this study also showed that the uniqueness of the product was the most important reason for people to pay for mass customised products, which confirmed Hunt’s (2006) and Schreier’s (2006) findings that people perceived mass customised products as greater in value.

However, on a more direct inquiry it was not the need for uniqueness that ranked as the most important motive. When people were asked whether uniqueness or the functional fit was most important to them, all participants ranked Utilitarianism first, followed by uniqueness. This finding confirmed Franke and Schreier’s results (2008) of the functional fit being most important in value creation for Mass Customisation, followed by the uniqueness of the product.

The Phase 2 Interview Results - part 5

The outcome of the experiential need was quite low in the questionnaires and it was not related to the experience of the production process but rather to the experience of the end-product. This outcome was supported by the interview answers on whether the product or the process was more important. However, it was found that the experience played an important role as well. In particular the Irish female group was more inclined to try out Mass Customisation for the experience. For non-Irish females the importance of the experience was indicated indirectly through the significance of the enjoyment of the process and the product.

Furthermore, it was found that a positive experience is very important for the success of a Mass Customisation strategy, as the results from questionnaires and interviews pointed out. The experience of customising a product from its design stage until after the delivery of the product seemed to be quite sensitive towards any form of bad word of mouth or a bad experience. It was deemed important to explore in the interviews people’s reasons to avoid customising in the future. And it was surprising that the price of the product was only the second most important reason and the availability only came third. Most participants found that a previous bad experience or bad word of mouth would significantly influence their decision to refrain from customising a product, which was supported by findings throughout the research.

It appeared that companies offering mass customised products are more prone to bad word of mouth than companies selling mass produced goods. This probably has to do with the high expectations that people have of mass customised products as they are produced to their preferences and directly for them. This result indicated that not only the affiliation motive but also the experiential need could work as a motivation to avoid Mass Customisation. Therefore, it is important for companies to prevent bad word of mouth and bad experiences through good quality products and customer service. It was also found in this study that the availability of Mass Customisation options needs to be emphasized more through advertisements; positive word of mouth could also help to sell these products. Therefore, a proactive rather than a reactive approach could be critical in achieving this.

This is the first study that found that a negative experience could have such a profound impact on a company offering mass customised products. This aspect was not addressed in any previous empirical research on Mass Customisation and people’s motivations. Therefore, previous papers on the importance of providing customers with an experience (Fiore et al. 2004; Gilmore and Pine 1999, 2007; Moser et al. 2006) have to be extended by including that a negative experience has to be avoided at all costs. Future research into the effect of the experience, whether for the creation process or the end-product, should be carried out. 

The results for the last motive, the utilitarian need, will be  presented in the next blog. 

The Phase 2 Interview Results - part 4

The questionnaire research on the power motive showed that only the Irish male group had a higher outcome in the power motive and it showed that male participants asserted power more directly compared to female participants who asserted power through gift-giving. Future research should also explore male participants’ relation to gift-giving and ultimately try to validate the way the gender groups assert power. Furthermore, the difference in the questionnaires on the power motive between the Irish male group and the non-Irish male group needs further investigation. Ego-enhancement ranked very high for the Irish male group, which gave the impression that they had a quite negative attitude towards the cartoon character. However, this could be a limitation of the cartoon itself.

            In the questionnaires gift-giving was mostly prominent in the female groups. Belk (1988) made a connection between McClelland’s power motive and Sartre’s idea of making an object a part of one’s self. Gift-giving was seen as a form of control over a possession, which is an extension of the self as the giver continues to be associated with the gift (Belk 1988). In the interview investigations the female groups showed a difference in their motives for the gift-giving. All participants said that they would give a mass customised product as a gift; some even said that they would only buy such a product as a present and not for their own use. The main reason for people to give customised products as presents was that it showed that they put more thought into it. However, Irish females were looking for appreciation from the receiver, whereas non-Irish females wished to be remembered by the receiver, which some emphasized would mostly be a family member. Future research should investigate this difference. Furthermore, it should be explored whether the results would be the same if a standardised product was used as it seemed that the nature of mass customised products, being co-created, had an influence on the answers concerning gift-giving. Future research should also include male participants, to explore whether there is a difference in gift giving between the gender groups and also different European nationalities.

The questionnaires showed a relatively high need for achievement in the form of self expression, which was based on Schreier’s categorisation (2006). This motive revealed a difference between the two female groups. Self expression ranked highest in the non-Irish female group and lowest in the Irish female group. However, further investigation in the interviews showed a different result. Self expression ranked higher in the Irish female group, which was connected to the higher outcome of non-commercial customisation here. However, self expression through non-commercially customised products was linked to teenagers, which meant that it mainly occurred at a certain age. This could possibly explain why self expression ranked lower in the non-Irish group as they had a lower outcome of non-commercial customisation. Nevertheless, one participant emphasized that a person incorporates a part of the self by creating a product, which implied that self expression could also happen unintentionally.

A more direct form of the achievement motive, which is “pride of authorship” (Schreier 2006) was not relevant in the questionnaires, but when asked in the interviews participants did say that they would feel proud of a co-created product. Satisfaction with that product was also an indication of this motive, which came up in the interviews. Whereas self expression was more important for Irish females in the interviews, pride and satisfaction were more significant for the non-Irish group. Future research should be undertaken to establish whether there really is a significant difference between the two groups.


The next blog will elaborate on the results for the experiential need, which includes a major finding of this researches study.

The Phase 2 Interview Results - part 3


Coming back to the main focus of this study, people’s motivations to purchase mass customised products, the interviews were used to explore this in more detail. It was found in the questionnaires that the motives identified by Zinkhan et al. (1999) a decade earlier in their U.S.-based study are also relevant in this European study. However, the order of relevance of these motives was found to be different. As the uniqueness motive ranked highest in the questionnaires and affiliation lowest, and Zinkhan et al.’s findings (1999) showed a high need for affiliation and a lower need for uniqueness, I assumed that the products that the studies focused on were the major reason for the different outcomes. Zinkhan et al. explored the creation of a personal website, whereas the cartoon in the questionnaire of my study was showing a customised T-shirt. This assumption was confirmed by the interview findings. The participants were asked:
1. In connection to a customised product such as a T-shirt, would they value the uniqueness and would they personalise to show that they belong to a certain social group. Affiliation was not significant here and most participants considered the uniqueness of a product as very important, which was connected to the fact that it was co-created.
2. This part was relating to the creation of a personal website and participants were asked, if they would do it to express their individuality and for social interaction. In the contrary the uniqueness motive was not important here, but similarly to Zinkhan et al.’s result affiliation turned out to be quite important, in particular for social networking sites.
Furthermore, it appeared that the need for uniqueness and the affiliation motive showed signs of being connected to the age of the participants for products such as T-shirts. The importance of belonging to a social group as well as the non-commercial customisation of products was more important for the participants when they were teenagers.

The need for affiliation generally had a very low outcome in the questionnaire phase of this study, which was a major difference to Zinkhan et al.’s research (1999). However, the need for affiliation came up at a different stage in the questionnaires as salesperson interaction and as anonymity in the buying process. This was investigated further in the interviews. The anonymity of the buyer was not found to have a big influence on the participants, but the salesperson interaction was again found to be important. Irish females appeared more optimistic about buying online, which they also did more frequently than non-Irish females. The enquiry on salesperson advice also showed that Irish females had a more negative opinion of sales staff compared to non-Irish females. Therefore, affiliation as salesperson interaction was found to be more significant for non-Irish females, but not as much as in the questionnaires. It was emphasized in the literature review that customer relationship management is important for Mass Customisation (F. Piller “The Importance of Customer Centricity” 2004). Future research should therefore be undertaken into the affiliation motive and the influence of salesperson interaction as a motivation for people to buy mass customised products online or in a shop.

More results will follow in the next blog.

The Phase 2 Interview Results - part 2


One major research focus of this study was the participants' experience with Mass Customisation and their understanding of the concept, which I elaborated on in my last blog entry. Another focus of this study was the participants' willingness to pay for these customised products.

The interviews revealed that the average that participants were willing to pay more for customised products was 37.5%. This result lies significantly below some previous willingness to pay research. For example, Franke and Piller (2004, Journal of Product Innovation Management) found in their study that people who were able to customise their watches using a design toolkit were willing to pay 100% more for this product. Similarly, Schreier's studies (2006, Journal of Consumer Behaviour) on customised cell phone covers, T-shirts and scarves also revealed an average willingness to pay 100% extra for these products. 

One possible explanation for the low result in this study could be that only female participants where included in the interviews. This was due to their low outcome of  previous customisation of products as it was found in the questionnaires. On the other hand male participants were not only more involved in customisation, the questionnaires also revealed that they had customised more expensive products than the female participants. This means that the average willingness to pay could have been higher, if male participants had been included. Furthermore, this was a relatively limited study as the number of participants in the interviews was quite low. 

The literature review, which was carried out before the data was gathered showed that the advance in technology played a major role in the development of Mass Customisation. Particularly the internet is an important medium in the marketing process as well as the creation of customised products by the customer using toolkits. Therefore, it was seen as important to consider the online activity of the participants in this study. In this connection Dellaert and Dabholkar (2009, International Journal of Electronic Commerce) explored the effect of complimentary online services on people's perceptions of the product outcome, which was found to be of a positive nature. These online-services included online salesperson advise, a visualization tool that showed customers their finished product and free product adaptation (such as a flexible return policy). In this study the idea was used to find out, if it had any effect on customers' willingness to purchase mass customised products. First it should be said that it was found in the questionnaires that the Irish females were the only group that preferred shopping online compared to shopping in a store. In the interviews this result was confirmed with the Irish participants being the more frequent internet shoppers. For them the visualisation tool was slightly more important, whereas the flexible return policy was more important for the non-Irish group. However, due to the small number of participants in the interviews this cannot be generalised and further research is required. Nevertheless, the online salesperson interaction was found to be less significant for both groups. It is certainly of interest to explore the reason for this outcome in the future.      

The Phase 2 Interview Results - part 1

In order to further explore the findings from the questionnaires, a number of interviews were also carried out. Some of the partakers from the first phase of the study were asked to participate in this. However, it was decided to only concentrate on female participants here. The questionnaires revealed that 44% of all participants had previously bought mass customised products. The number for the female participants was much lower than for the male participants. Furthermore, male participants had customised more expensive products than females. Particularly the non-Irish females had a very low outcome for customisation of products. During the interviews a surprising result emerged. For the Irish and non-Irish females the number of previous customisation rose to 92%. In the discussion section this was attributed to the fact that the participants were told to include commercial as well as non-commercial customisation. At this point I was trying to isolate participants' understanding of Mass Customisation and it emerged that it differed between participants as some saw customisation in everything they put their mark on, i.e. by applying stickers to a product. It further showed that people’s ideas of the concept were based on their previous experiences.
It was also found that the participants' understanding of Mass Customisation differed from the industry’s perspective on the concept. To explain this last point: the classification by Gilmore and Pine in their ‘Four Faces of Mass Customization’ (2000) that was introduced earlier was used here to categories participants answers. It was found that almost all interview participants had customised a product commercially or non-commercially by applying only some degree of customisation, i.e. by customising a greeting card or a T-shirt, which falls under the cosmetic approach by Gilmore and Pine (2000).  Nobody had actually customised the entire product, which would be the collaborative approach or pure customisation. The discussion within the industry is concerned with the question whether the cosmetic approach can be called Mass Customisation and some argued that only the collaborative approach is really Mass Customisation (Zipkin “The Limits of Mass Customization” 2001). This research result showed that at least in this group customisation had not yet advanced towards the collaborative approach and the participants’ understanding of Mass Customisation was much broader.

In the course of this study some research was also carried out in connection to willingness to pay for mass customized products and participants' attitudes towards online shopping. The results for that part of the study will follow shortly.